Pal,
4 part article from Upside on Internet branding:
upside.com
Interesting comments from Bill Morris, Dell Online marketing manager:
For its part, Dell was the fifth-largest spender in tech trade magazines last year, at $53 million, according to Eugene, Ore.-based ad-tracking firm Adscope Inc. And Dell broke a $100 million-plus branding campaign this summer--almost entirely on TV. The Austin, Texas-based company hopes to conduct 50 percent of all transactions online in the next couple of years, but contends that that kind of volume won't come from Web advertising. Bill Morris, senior marketing manager at Dell Online, emphasizes that it's extremely important to point to www.dell.com in all corporate communication. Yet he remains skeptical of online advertising.
"We're not doing a lot of it. We haven't found a model that works," Morris says. "Look at what's being done on the Internet. It's all commerce. This is not the place to do branding."
Morris says that despite an implied promise of accountability, the Web doesn't offer proof-of-concept--meaning that anyone who wants to believe has to work hard at it. "We're not looking to drive traffic to our site, and that's what Web advertising is good at," he adds. "We're finding that the ROI [return on investment] is low, and it's difficult to measure. When we do a print piece, we know precisely how many computers we need to build based on our ad plan. It's that scientific. The Internet breaks up that entire process." |
